


The Closet

by RurouniHime



Category: Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, First Kiss, Illnesses, M/M, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-22
Updated: 2011-07-22
Packaged: 2017-10-21 16:09:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/227078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He had a day or two. A day and a day, and there was nothing to build within that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Closet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FireElemental79](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=FireElemental79).



> SPOILERS for the film, impending character death, zombie sensibilities, and remember this is based on a horror film about walking dead people; thus you have been warned.

The room was too much like a closet.

Peter stared down the length of it— for closet it was, recently the abode of boxes and crates and food, food, food— at its opaque pasty-yellow walls and the flat, stale sense of ‘not for humans.’ Dried goods. Canned goods.

They, all of _them_ , Fran and Stephen and the two of them in here, were all canned, lately.

“Fucks better not find a can opener,” he said.

Roger shifted on the floor beside him, a feeble turn toward his right side, forgotten almost as soon as it was attempted. Peter felt a glimmer of regret for speaking aloud in the closet, but it faded as Roger’s wakefulness did, his moist breathing sounds lengthening again. Roger’s hand had slid further across his own stomach, almost down his opposite side, and there it dangled, limp and white as fish, with blue veins running through the wrist just in the shadows and the bruise-color in the hollows of his fingers. He looked as though he’d been rolled with his arms trailing, and now he lay on his back and breathed and slept.

Peter thought the walls a better view just then, and fixed his eyes on the one across from him, down the way with the door on the right and his gun nestled there in the corner, out of reach.

Stephen thought they had time. Fran would have taken that gun and bashed sense over Peter’s head with it if she knew he’d left it there.

Roger was a warm weight against his right thigh, curled without being curled in two of their nondescript wool blankets. The closet was stuffy, and Roger shook like a leaf when it was most hot. Peter realized his lips had curved upward on their own and grimaced them straight again. His ass ached from the hard floor beneath. The flimsy mattress under the other man could not have been much of a godsend, but then, God had sent a lot of things lately, and Peter didn’t consider any of them comfortable, even the ones that let them lock glass doors with bolts and padlocks, and provided them with ammunition from their own private gun shop, and a wheelbarrow so they could all be together in this.

Fran and Stephen were in the so-called kitchen, or Fran was, her still-flat belly pressed to the wash basin as she scrubbed mechanically at the spaghetti pot with the noise of the television serenading their quaint little home. Stephen was never far from Fran. Even with this whole empty mall, they were all within thirty square feet, and it never got tiring, not to Peter. It was enough for him now, especially.

It was enough that Roger couldn’t go out at all anymore. It was enough that he had morphine shoved up his veins almost constantly now. It was enough that he coughed whenever he was awake, and regularly emptied his stomach contents onto the unforgiving floor next to them all as often as he ate. It was enough, it was, it—

“It’s enough, damn it! Enough!”

This time, Roger’s stirring was pronounced. “Peter?”

He sighed and looked down, eyes skipping over the soiled bandage encircling Roger’s forearm once again. His smile came when summoned. He was glad to feel it this time. “Sorry, Rog. Go back to sleep.”

Roger let out a heavy breath, sounding winded and lost at the same time. “Awake now.” He lifted that pale hand and let it drop. “I was having a dream. Fran’s baby was a girl.”

“She’ll be interested to hear that.”

Roger stared upward for a moment and then rocked his head from side to side. “Don’t tell her,” was all he said.

Peter frowned and smoothed the blanket, looking back at the wall. “Have a drink, brother.”

Roger’s eyes glazed a bit. His nose wrinkled, a weak, sickly reminder of the joy-fervor his face had held before. Such a child, an enchanting child in a man’s body. Peter wanted to cup his hand over Roger’s nose. It was a joke; he didn’t want to be reminded.

“Really not thirsty.”

“You think I care about that?”

Roger’s head swiveled and his hollow eyes looked up into Peter’s face. After a moment, they skittered away, a restless jag through the air to whatever. “Don’t want to lie here, though. Help me?”

The plea was inappropriate. Roger didn’t need jostling, he needed a damn cure. Peter wanted rather insanely to cut the troubled leg off, now, now while there might still be time. Stupid. It was all in Roger now. All through his blood. “Yeah. Yeah, here—”

Peter got up on his knees and bent over, and Roger lifted his arm again and slid it over his back, palm pressing into his shoulder. Peter kneaded a hand carefully under the slightly raised torso, hitching once— Roger hissed— and gripping firmly around the other’s waist. Roger’s hand slipped upward and fingers closed thinly over the nape of his neck. Roger’s skin was dry, calluses tracking faintly across Peter’s delicate skin. Peter heaved Roger’s body up, so thin, too thin, it came so very easily off the mattress, and found himself a mere inch from his friend’s face.

Roger’s eyes were riddled with pain, muffled in the mist of it, and yet they pierced straight through the most fragile hollow in Peter’s throat. His breathing clotted, stopped altogether.

Roger stared at him, fingers a soft knot at his nape. “Gonna die,” he whispered. “Pete?”

Peter couldn’t speak, but he could shake his head, and he did, and Roger made a noise like a beaten animal and pulled with his one hand. Peter hitched him up one more time, and then forgot what he was doing. Roger’s gaze skipped from one of his eyes to the other, then down to his mouth. His tongue came out to wet his lips.

Peter leaned forward as if pushed, hugging the other man’s thinning frame to him.

His mouth touched down on soft, unshaven skin. Roger turned his head just a tiny bit and skin turned into a mouth that opened immediately. Peter shut his eyes. Roger’s tongue was thick and sluggish in his mouth, moving weakly, tasting like nothing but warmth and water. Peter’s shoulders went limp; he felt them go, a gentle release, and he imagined a hushed sound floating along with it, the whisper-sift of silence falling.

The bite, when it came, was subtle and small, right on the curve of his lower lip. Teeth pricked. Slid. Clenched.

Peter jerked back, hitting the wall before his instincts told him he was far enough away and rebounding again to find Roger’s milky eyes staring up through half-lowered lids. His mouth was kiss-reddened, lips deceptively plump with life and blood. Roger blinked. A pained moan issued from between his parted lips. His hand clutched at Peter’s nape, struggling to remain there.

Peter tasted his lip before thinking, running his tongue over tender skin, inside his mouth over the tracks of Roger’s teeth there, and outside, where the touch of the other man’s mouth lingered. Stubble just beneath his lip, no iron. He lifted a shaking hand and rubbed his fingertips against the place, dipped a thumb inside his mouth to feel. There were no tears in the skin.

The color of Roger’s irises beamed through the morphine fog that buried them, muted and still desperate, as if just waiting to bloom back into the relief of childlike blue. There was nothing in his face, no recognition of what he’d done with his mouth and teeth. Nothing in his eyes but a wandering fever. The change was utter and complete, and Peter sought for the proper amount of air to keep himself from toppling.

Roger didn’t see him. If he ever had. He had… Peter thought. Maybe the word was ‘wished.’

Maybe it no longer mattered.

A few days, he thought, before he knew. Dinners with Fran and Stephen, breakfasts with himself, four trips down to check the doors and remind himself of what was outside, but not inside yet. Maybe a death in the family. If he hadn’t begun to feel dizzy and sick by then—

Peter lowered Roger back to the floor more quickly than he’d intended, feeling the incumbent sickness in him, wanting insanely not to feel it, not to see far enough into the future for the closet to be empty again. Or filled with boxes again.

“Roger?” he said softly, and his voice shook.

Roger’s eyes had rolled up, his eyelids fallen shut. His chest rose and fell with each audible breath.

The closet felt like a coldly lit tunnel, strangely long. Peter swallowed and felt the impossibility of silence.

“Why in hell didn’t you listen to me?” He gripped Roger’s shoulder, too hard, the flesh thinner and bonier and weaker than before. Resisted the urge to shake and shake. “Why in hell’d you go after that bag when they were all over it?”

He felt completely impotent. Like he could do nothing, there was nothing he could ever do, and all he wanted was to turn back the clock just a little and drag Roger away from that blasted semi loading dock and back inside where they could lock the doors and put their considerable smarts together and come up with something just as good for the unblocked doors that were left.

But that felt more useless. Fuck. If he was going to turn back time, why not turn it all the way back to the beginning, and stop any of this from ever happening?

Except then he never would have run into Roger at all.

He leaned back against the wall and shut his eyes, listening to the inhale-exhale beside him, wondering if zombies breathed. If their lungs worked. If any fragment of memory survived beyond instinctual recollection.

He wanted to be remembered by Roger. He wanted the last few moments to be _remembered_.

He opened his eyes and found the dark, innocent outline of the gun against the far wall, and knew that it wouldn’t fucking matter if he were remembered.

He had a day or two. A day and a day, and there was nothing to build within that. Peter found Roger’s hand without looking and slipped his fingers around still-warm flesh. Squeezed.

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so. The homoerotic tones in this movie are not nearly as subtle as in most movies. There is an entire philosophical study on this particular pairing, or so I understand. Pretty much blatantly conceptualized within the film itself, though no one comes right out and says anything. I cannot recommend this movie enough. Seeing as it is a Romero zombie film, I will warn you and say that it has gore and destruction and dead people eating and dismembering living people, of course. But the commentary, OH, the social commentary! Not to mention the homoerotic under/overtones.


End file.
